Chris’ Weekly Journal for Oct 14 to Oct 27/18

All Caught Up!

Updated: Nov 10/18 | By: Chris Herbert

It’s Saturday October 27th and this weekend finds me catching up on my Journal posts, playing in Squash Ontario’s Masters Tournament [Twitter thread] and wishing my youngest grandson a very, very happy fourth birthday. Some cool things happened this week in and around our community and here’s three things that came to mind.

JSON Web Tokens, or JWTs, are a very important aspect of internet technology, be it Internet of Things, or Internet of People. Knowing this makes it very confusing as to why there’s so little discussion about it, and so much misinformation about it. So I’m writing this blog post to share some information, and hopefully clear away the mists that surround this subject.

This software P2P group is one of our strongest with over 270 members led by David Ashton with support from my cofounder Rick Stomphorst, other P2P members and organizations like Indellient [Website | LinkedIn| Twitter], Apple Suites [Website | LinkedIn] and alternawork [Website | LinkedIn | Twitter] . The topics have been set for Nov and Jan. [Learn more].

Make in Halton App Emoggo Launches!

Congratulations to Lisa Denis on the launch of her new venture Emoggo [Website | LinkedIn | iOS | Android | Twitter]. Emoggo is a mobile digital marketing channel developed to generate a community of customers who will support, through sales, local businesses. It’s an app that connects consumers with all the local businesses that are around them in Halton Region. Plans are to roll out Emoggo in other markets.

Halton is the pilot market. Download the app [iOS | Android] and if you own a business or know of someone that does make sure the claim the listing and find out how to use Emoggo to generate traffic and sales. I’d like to personally thank and acknowledge Mark Arteaga [LinkedIn | Twitter] , Hazel van der Werken-Small [LinkedIn | Twitter] and the RedBit Development team [Website | LinkedIn | Twitter] for the amazing work they’ve done working with Lisa to bring this app to life! A great example of Silicon Halton community members working together!

Thinking and Acting Beyond “Smart Cities”

As some of you may know Silicon Halton has held two smart cities meetup in 2018 including: Silicon Halton Meetup #102 – IoT in Smart Cities and our Smart City Meetup with Silicon Halton and Town of Oakville. The IoT Peer2Peer group has presented on smart buildings and LP Wan as well. There’s a very important reason why we’ve been doing this and the video below illustrates this very well. It’s from the Intelligent Communities Forum who had a round table event earlier this week which I attended on behalf of the SH Community. Invest seven minutes of your time to learn why it’s important for the broader community to work with government and in some (many?) cases take a leadership role.

I tweeted the agenda below and this is what makes ICF THE organization to be involved with when it comes to Smart Cities. Case study after case study! Sharing lessons learned with each other! Awesomeness! intelligent communities! You can check out my full tweet thread from coverage of ICF Canada’s [Website | Twitter] Round Table Forum earlier this week here.

One of the best presentations was by the City of Hamilton which included this awesome video promoting Hamilton. The video is great, the tune is great and what makes this video very special to me is the City of Hamilton is using local artist’s Monster Truck [Website | Twitter] song “Not Enough” [Spotify]. This City gets what it takes to be an intellligent community.

What’s Next in Our Community?

Lot’s of stuff happening in our community and there are two places on this site to refer to regularly. Places to check out are: our newsletter, events page and blog posts. And, remember to check out what our TU20 team is up to as well.

Chris Herbert is a social entrepreneur. His current ventures are: Silicon Halton, Mi6 Agency and TechIgniters. He's a former squash professional and passionate about helping entrepreneurs, technology companies and professionals achieve success. He's a proud Canadian and plans to make Halton region the greatest place on the planet to live, work and play.